


little wing (she’s my flight of fancy)

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cassian you're working too hard, Dancing, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, Inspired by Hamilton, Inspired by Music, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 14:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: At the end of a long weary work-bender, Cassian finds himself in Jyn's audience -- at home, and with nothing but the afternoon sunlight for company.





	little wing (she’s my flight of fancy)

Something blares and vibrates and starts flashing and he flails back, he rears up, and he would be looking at the mess of coffee dregs and energy-drink bottles and spent teabags staining all the paperwork on his desk now, if he hadn’t drunk those same mugs and glasses and plastic bottles already fruitlessly dry.

So much for that vaunted caffeine rush -- or perhaps he’s too old and too tired and too jaded for caffeine to even work on him any more.

He can _hear_ his heart leap into his throat and lodge there, stuck stubborn, as he throws his own panicked gaze to the next logical and only other target: his computer screen.

And wonder of wonders: there’s a document sitting there on the desktop that wasn’t there when he sat down this morning -- or was it last night, when he’d started pulling this latest mother of all-nighters? 

He blinks at the document. The title is coherent -- it even makes sense to his dazed mind -- and he clicks on it. Waits the loaded seconds for his word-processor to boot up. 

There are only a few red-hued notes to deal with on the pages of the report that he’s supposed to be presenting to his boss. His bosses, actually. He already knows he’s on the verge of a promotion: what he doesn’t know is which office he’s going to next.

Figures, he thinks, and despite the nervousness he can feel his own sour disappointment like a sharp pins-and-needles coating on his tongue. It’s taken him all of seven years to get comfortable working in this particular place, with these particular people, with Bodhi and Kay, and now that he feels like he knows the ground beneath his feet, he’s going to get uprooted and left to fend for himself yet again.

Story of his life.

Still: the report. It’s there. It exists, and all the data works out, and he actually thinks he likes some of his own sentences -- caffeine-hazy and sleep-deprived though they might be -- and the whole thing is ready for print, for archiving, for everything that he needs to do and then all he needs is to struggle into his only good suit for the presentation.

Okay.

Maybe he can go back to his apartment -- his half-an-apartment -- and maybe he’ll still be lucky when he gets there, and be able to draw all the curtains and set an alarm for a little over twenty-four hours. Sleep -- he needs sleep more than anything else in this world. And a couple of gallons of water. He helps himself from the nearest water cooler -- it’s tepid, and flat, and he winces going down, and it’s still water, washing away the hours and hours of frantic brain-wracking and word-hunting and keyboard-pecking.

Trudging out of the office: he starts when he sees his own shadow, brilliant golden-hued around the edges, and he looks up into a late-afternoon sky, the sun already well on its way back to the horizon from which it must have risen, and there’s a cool breeze blowing in from the west. It whispers soft promises against the overheated and sweat-stiff collar of his shirt. Against the ink stains on his cuffs, against his shoes that still pinch at the heel. 

He lets himself glance at his sun-crazed reflection in the window of the train that will speed him out to one of the nearer and older suburb towns, and he’s expecting the deep lines crowding the corners of his eyes. He’s expecting the lank hair drooping down around his ears.

He’s not expecting the hint of the smile hoisting the corner of his mouth up.

Smiling, despite his mangled and spindled mind.

His watch tells him it’s heading toward Saturday evening: therefore the traffic is going in every other direction save the one he’s picked. Everyone else is heading out to drink, to eat, to get shitfaced.

Him, he’s going home to a long-overdue appointment with his scratchy sheets and the groan in the climate control and the mostly-empty cramped spaces of home.

Mostly empty?

On the sidewalk, right in front of the steps disappearing up into the building where his walk-up apartment is perched on the fourth floor, he can already see the lights burning in his windows.

Which means she’s here: and right, he remembers, half an apartment. He’s got a bedroom and part of the kitchen, most of the shelves in the refrigerator, one of the laundry baskets. Half of the bills.

The rest belongs to her.

And he makes his way up and on the third-floor landing he can already guess where the driving beat of drums and raucous voices is coming from: the beat is loudest right on his own doorstep, where he loses several seconds not fumbling for his keys, but instead humming along to an emotional lyric line:

_I remember those soldier boys_   
_Tripping over themselves to win our praise_   
_I remember that dreamlike candlelight_   
_Like a dream that you can’t quite place_

He tries to cover his smile with the same fist from which his keys are hanging, and he knows he can’t succeed, not when he’s hearing such an incongruous unbridled joy in the voice that’s rapping along to Angelica Schuyler as brought to life by Renée Elise Goldsberry.

_I have never been the same_   
_Intelligent eyes in a hunger-pang frame_   
_And when you said “Hi,” I forgot my dang name_   
_Set my heart aflame, ev’ry part aflame_   
_This is not a game!_

For once the door opens soundlessly. 

Or perhaps he never hears its customary long wailing cry, its hinges like a battalion of stepped-upon cats, because he’s too busy looking for the source of those telltale thumps, the little sounds of leaping and landing, and he’s careful where he himself steps, where he himself treads, lest he get in the way --

He sees the sweep of her hair first, falling out of its usual sloppy braid. The faint but beckoning scent of jasmine. Sparkle of tiny star-shaped hairpins clustered around the edges of a bright smile.

Jyn Erso: who must surely know that he’s here now. Who must surely know that now when she moves she’s got an audience. And instead of stopping and falling back into the rap -- he’s heard this song so many times he’s almost unwittingly got it memorized, too -- she’s dancing to it, instead.

Her bare feet land upon the battered kitchen tiles with the force of a ragtag army, marching out of line -- or perhaps it’s the line of disappointed suitors heading stoop-shouldered away from the fierce eyes of the bride. The sharper eyes of the sisters of the bride. Her hands sweep out gracefully, and he thinks of champagne flutes sparking and sparkling in the candle-flames of a dozen chandeliers, but he also thinks of swords. Of the clacking staccato back-and-forth of a duel at blades’ length. She’s wearing leggings and a sleeveless tunic, no skirts or coattails to speak of, so she twirls instead, sends the ends of her hair flying as if in endless motion, her shoulders and her hips and the soles of her feet in rapidfire movement like a symphony in combat, in dance, in the driving wordplay of Angelica’s lines.

He chimes in at the right time, and he doesn’t at all feel like Alexander Hamilton when he speaks, much less Lin Manuel Miranda: “Where are you taking me?”

Jyn lip-syncs to the inevitable reply: “I’m about to change your life!”

He drops into the nearest chair that is still well out of the way of the arc of her moving hands, her moving feet, and watches. Now, like the rest of the company, he’s the audience, and she’s in the spotlight where she belongs, where she has always belonged.

There are all kinds of footwear inhabiting the bottom of her side of the closet, and every pair has a purpose: almost-flat shoes with their little bows and their scuffed metal plates at heel and toe. Socks that only ever cover her toes and her ankles, stuffed into ripped-up canvas sneakers that always make her small feet seem even smaller. Huge clompy work boots, for actual going out on the town and dancing up a storm. One single pair of vampy pumps, inches of platforms and stiletto heels and all, and those the ones he keeps hearing about in the office, black shiny leather on top and blood-red painted on the bottoms. 

(How Jyn manages to stay _comfortable_ in that pair is a mystery that he’ll never be able to unravel, nor does he want to.)

The song’s come to an end, and the music’s changed to something more martial, to something into which ethereal Russian lyrics seem to be mixed as if by accident and by fortuitous deliberation, and as he watches Jyn briefly leaps into the air, is briefly unbound by gravity: it’s a jeté, not a grand one but a jeté nonetheless, and her toes don’t bang into the counters or the refrigerator or the ponderously humming air-conditioner. 

When she lands, she does something graceful with her hands, and then stops dead, though the music continues in its haunting relentless wafting rise.

And Jyn places the full weight of her attention on him.

He can’t help but sit up straighter. Weary shoulders moving back, chin coming up.

When she laughs, he laughs with her, and relief is a bright gentle warm balm cascading down his nerves.

He laughs even more when she falls over into a graceless slump next to him, a pool of still muscles on the floor, the afternoon sunlight breaking around the specks of dust shivering in the air. 

He’s still sleepy, he’s still fatigue-slow, he’s still jangling from too much work and too much caffeine, and he can still laugh: and he’s grateful, so very grateful, when Jyn takes one of his hands in both of her own, and holds his fingertips to her cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Prompt Fifteen: "joy" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](https://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr. 
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](https://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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